Category Archives: Music

A new app called Playlist aims to make music a more social experience than what’s offered today by the major music platforms like Apple Music, Pandora or Spotify, for example. In Playlist, you can find others who share your musical tastes and join group chats where you listen to playlists together in real time. You can collaborate on playlists, too. The app, backed by investment from Stanford’s StartX fund, was founded by Karen Katz and Steve Petersen, both Stanford engineers and serial entrepreneurs. Katz previously co-founded AdSpace Networks […]

SoundCloud moves painfully slow for a tech company, and no one feels that pain more than musicians who are popular on the site but don’t get paid. 10 years since SoundCloud first launched, and four years since it opened an invite-only program allowing just the very biggest artists to earn a cut of the ad and premium subscription revenue generated by their listeners, SoundCloud is rolling out monetization. Now, musicians 18 and up who pay SoundCloud $8 to $16 per month for hosting, get over 5000 streams […]

Dressed in a Naruto t-shirt and a hat emblazoned with the phrase “lone wolf,” Ne-Yo slouches over in a chair inside a Holberton School classroom. The Grammy-winning recording artist is struggling to remember the name of “that actor,” the one who’s had a successful career in both the entertainment industry and tech investing. “I learned about all the things he was doing and I thought it was great for him,” Ne-Yo told TechCrunch. “But I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.” It turns out “that […]

Spotify is racing to sign up users before Apple Music can, even at the expense of its finances. Spotify’s second quarter as a public company saw mixed performance compared to estimate as it reached 83 million paid subscribers, up 40 percent year-over-year and up 8 million from its 75 million count last quarter. Spotify now has 180 million total users, coming in at the high end of its guidance with a 5.9 percent quarter-over-quarter growth rate, though it added fewer users than last quarter. But Spotify saw […]